Just another false alarm...

Nasty, Brutish and 5'6"

Saturday, March 20, 2004

Windy city

As always, I took a walk through Birmingham today to see what had changed since the last time I left it. Usually I can expected a new shopping centre, a closed cinema or the like, but today there wasn't too much different. The main reason I've been happy to leave Birmingham as often as possible is the City Council's willingness to prostrate all of what remains of our civic pride before whatever commercial forces come our way... So, for example, while the town hall - a beautiful neoclassical thing - is being renovated the scaffolding has been treated as free space. Over Christmas this meant that we were treated to the delights of a giant Coca Cola advent calendar and since then one of Birmingham's most visible (and historic) squares has been one big advert. Naomi Klein eat your heart out.

But today I was happy, because the winds have blown the posters off the side, and the town hall is, however briefly, visible again. The Council has also risen a little in my estimation, due to its new poster campaign - "Homophobic Violence: Ignoring is Condoning".

Though this does assume that the average homophobe would know what condoning means, and wouldn't just go 'damn right' if they did...